Well St George’s day was such a non-event for Helston! Did anyone actually celebrate it? I like to join the Irish to celebrate St Patrick’s Day because there is a drop or two of Irish blood running through my veins. The Scots have St Andrew’s Day and the Welsh, St David’s (celebrated by our own MD Wendy) but England just doesn’t seem to keep up with tradition. We did once upon a time but it was killed off in the 18th century.

On Wednesday, I dressed up in red and white and ran round singing Jerusalem at the top of my voice to celebrate my half English heritage (true story). Everyone I bumped into asked me why I was wearing patriotic colours! Only 3 others knew it was St George’s day at all!

Fancy a national holiday?

Despite my attempts to stir up everyone’s patriotic feelings, the pride we all felt at the Olympics, (hundreds of people watching the flame arrive by plane to our local navy base) and the street parties celebrating the Royal wedding seem so far into the distant past. There have been a few crusaders who have attempted to rekindle the fires of patriotic pride (pledge to take the day off or vote to move the bank holiday so the season starts earlier…) Poor old St George does seem to be the forgotten saint. I’m very tempted to start a campaign of my own to make St George’s a national holiday. It would be very fitting and would be a great bonus for Anytime Booking and our customers if we managed to add another holiday date to the calendar!

Cornish Pride…

Back in Helston we really know how to throw a party. Every year on May 8th we throw the best street party ever! Flora Day is a mix of pagan and traditional rituals celebrating the end of winter and welcoming in the spring. We celebrate vitality and fertility by adorning the town with flowers and foliage, singing, dancing and loving life! The day starts off with the Servants Dance followed by the Hal-an-Tow, a mummers type play telling the story of St George slaying the dragon. Several dances follow including the Children’s and the Midday where processions of Ascot style dresses and traditional top hat and tail outfits adorn the dancers. Wouldn’t it be great if the rest of England put on a show like we do? We’re planning to set up a webcam to live stream the event from our office. Keep your eye on our Facebook and Twitter to find out how we get on!

Three cheers to St George and 3 C’s… here’s to Courage, Chivalry and Charity.

What’s the latest in Tech world?You will probably hear in the news soon that Facebook, Google and other techy type companies are all giving press releases about the Heartbleed Bug.

What’s the problem?OpenSSL, the technology that powers the SSL certificates, has a security hole which could potentially leak unsecure information to the outside world.

What’s an SSL certificate? How does it affect us?We have an SSL certificate on our booking system software that helps keep our data safe. When you see a padlock on the address bar it shows the SSL certificate is quietly protecting you in the background. It secures all web traffic between you (our clients) and the back office of the Anytime Booking software. Although we’re not handling credit card data ourselves, we still have an SSL certificate to ensure we’re PCI compliant whilst talking to other payment gateway providers like Paypal and Sagepay.

What do I need to do?As far as your Anytime Booking account is concerned, Nothing! As of 1400hrs BST yesterday our server was patched by our operating system provider. (We use one of the most secure operating systems in the market).

We haven’t found any evidence that Heartbleed has affected us, but to be safe we have applied the patch to our servers and are now protected from any vulnerability from the Haertbleed bug!